OT: My Heritage

Sunday, March 04, 2007

Random Wikipedia browsing one of my favorite ways to kill time. To my surprise, I came across few pages that I never imagined would be there. About times and places long gone by and forgotten. Here is a sample.

This is the place that I hail from. My parents are from interior villages of Bhagalpur, most commonly known for its Riots. During my childhood we used to visit there every summer vacation. The last time I was there was 7 years ago and am sure that I wont ever visit it again. I still fondly remember the places and times but. Village life is so much different.

My mother tongue is this. I have vivid memories of one of my distant uncles telling me about it during one of our trips. He was a local school teacher. My mother still speaks it, but neither my brother nor me can speak it anymore. Its not going to get passed down to our kids obviously. Which is a bit sad.

I was born at this place. I spent most of my childhood and teenage years here. Silchar is still the place I call my hometown and identify the most with. I used to speak the local dialect of Bengali (called Sylethi) fluently although that is also fading now. Reminds me of a strange story. The house next mine was under construction. One day I woke up with a feeling of deja vu. I though I was in Silchar. The reason was the workers on the next bulding were speaking fluent Sylethi. It was surreal. Took few moments for me come back to reality.

All this just goes to illustrate why Wikipedia is the most important repository of cataloged information today. Its an amazing piece of work.

We have read posts related to genealogy on your blog and have just launched family based social network, Kincafe- www.kincafe.com. We would like you to particpate in beta release of Kincafe and provide feedback to andy@kincafe.com.